The main reason that the abortion movement cannot quite disentangle itself from its roots in 19th-century eugenics is the niggling, persistent fact that it doesn’t really want to. Consider this from Amanda Marcotte, who is clutching her ironically worn thrift-store pearls over the fact that Indiana may pass a law that would make it a crime for parents to kill their children over a disability.
No one is well served when children with disabilities are forced on families that know they don’t have the emotional or financial resources to help them. And this entire bill, which is supported by anti-choice groups in Indiana, would only truly impact the most vulnerable families—those who don’t have the money or ability to travel out of state to get these abortions elsewhere.
This is familiar, ancient, nasty stuff: that sick people and disabled people are a burden, that this burden outweighs their humanity, that the poor cannot be trusted to care for the children they have, etc. That “no one is well served,” the inescapable implication of which is that the children in question are better off dead.
All of this is based upon the reduction of human life to an accounting entry. There is an occasion upon which the state and its representatives are in fact legitimately called upon to go about the grim business of accounting for human lives and human deaths on a ledger—war. War is a poor operating model for family life, but those who advocate abortion as a means to some desirable social outcome — all of whom are eugenicists, whether they understand themselves as such or do not — bring war into the obstetrician’s office, into the nursery, and into the family.
Who lives? Who dies? Who is fit to be born? Would any sane human being leave those questions to Amanda Marcotte et al.?
A great many of our progressive friends can’t tell their millions from their billions, but they think that society is some grand equation that they are competent to balance, proving that the lives of people with Down syndrome or other disabilities are worth nothing — or that their value is in fact negative, that society would be positively better off without them. We say otherwise.